Artist: Plebeian GrandstandTitle: Lowgazers
Release: Tape / CD / LP / Digital
Year: 2014
Label: Throatruiner / Basement Apes / Lost Pilgrims Records / Grains Of Sand / BLWBCK / The Lamp Foundation
Plebeian Grandstand are from Toulousse, France and are certainly not shitting around. The band has been active since 2008 and has released a good number of records, both ep/full-length stuff and splits with a pack of neat outfits like Cortez. But what they have done in Lowgazers is a first-timer for them.
Seriously, this album is hell. Plebeian Grandstand have always had the passion for being noisy but with this record they brought it to an abnormal level. Lowgazers is fast and soaked with cold and distance. The music is scorching, massive, deep and distorted, a total sonic destruction. It lingers between extreme hardcore and even more extreme black metal. Dissonant guitar work, backed up by a wall of drumming intensely pierced by vocals, which are mostly raw and tearing, but sometimes arise from distance, like ritual chanting or an introvert monologue.
Lowgazers is a ferocious wind spreading fire to exterminate all that’s alive and enslave the burnt survivors to its total blackness. When Plebeian Grandstand are slow they are heavy and dominant. Just like watching melted magma you are deceived by its beauty but when it’s finally near enough you are gone.
Lowgazers is hard to endure, it’s not giving you any rest for its 40 minutes. At a certain point you’re just sitting there nauseous while the pieces are just grabbing you and throwing you in their realms of human lack. I wonder how does this look and sound live?
